Larry Ellison: Oracle replaced Red Hat support at Yahoo

Summary:Updated: Oracle CEO Larry Ellison was spreading the love for his competitors on the company's third quarter conference call. Notably, Ellison said Oracle replaced Red Hat for Linux support at Yahoo.

Updated: Oracle CEO Larry Ellison was spreading the love for his competitors on the company's third quarter conference call.

Notably, Ellison said Oracle replaced Red Hat for Linux support at Yahoo. Oracle's Linux support, which is aimed at undercutting Red Hat, is off to a solid start with Dell, Hewlett-Packard and CDW reselling service. Ellison also noted that Oracle has sold some large enterprise contracts in the $500,000 range.

Ellison didn't disclose sales for Oracle's Linux business, but indicated he was confident. "Oracle has displaced Red Hat at Yahoo and numerous other customer sites as their Linux support supplier. That is extremely important and this is just the beginning," said Ellison, referring to the Linux support business. "We're not going to build it overnight, but we will build it."

On other topics, Ellison ripped SAP--a quarterly occurrence--and its strategy to target the midmarket with A1S. "We have a good chance to catch and surpass SAP in the applications business," said Ellison.

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and SmartPlanet as well as Editorial Director of ZDNet's sister site TechRepublic. He was most recently Executive Editor of News and Blogs at ZDNet. Prior to that he was executive news editor at eWeek and news editor at Baseline. He also served as the East Coast news editor and finance editor at CN...
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